The War Whisperer: Book 1: Geronimo

  The War

  Whisperer

  The War Whisperer

  __________________________

  Book 1:

  Geronimo

  Barry B. Longyear

  Enchanteds Publishing

  New Sharon, Maine

  The War Whisperer, Book 1: Geronimo is a work of fiction. The contents of this work are either products of the author’s invention or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events are coincidental.

  Enchanteds edition, The War Whisperer, Book 1: Geronimo copyright © 2019 by Barry B. Longyear, all rights reserved including the right to reproduce this work or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information write: Barry B. Longyear, PO Box 100, New Sharon ME 04955.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Not so very far into the future

  Lost & Found

  I was born in south-central Texas, January First, in the city of Uvalde the third year of the disastrous Dan Sykes single-term presidency, and the same day we got the news that the third manned mission to Mars had been destroyed as it attempted to land. Renewed wars in Syria and Egypt were winding down as President Sykes, Congress, and the news media joined forces against the U.S. Armed Forces and managed to turn two complete military victories into bitter and embarrassing defeats for the United States blamed, of course, on “the other party.”

  Moments after I was born I was abandoned. The Uvalde Police Department report in my file states I had been discovered in a trash bin behind a Mexican restaurant called “Chikanista!” at Lovers Lane and Main Street in Uvalde. My unlikely savior had been a half-mad famished homeless veteran who called himself Zoomy Nine Eagles.

  Zoomy had been going through the garbage, looking for something he could gag down, when he found me. Zoomy told the police I had appeared magically in a plastic shopping bag from the Walmart Ultracenter at Main and North Ham. Bag and baby were in the midst of half-eaten chicken enchiladas, empty packaging, Styrofoam popcorn, brown gobs of three-day-old guacamole, and smears of maggoty burrito filling.

  I still remember the recording Detective Lieutenant Espinoza played for me almost fifty years later.

  “I reach in for it—zoom— pack of taco shells, little moldy—Okay, zoom! reach for it and, and, and —he stick out this little hand, see? —Zoom! Zoom! See? Baby! See?”

  I’ve watched that police recording they made of the questioning of Zoomy Nine Eagles at least a hundred times. Zoomy had short black beard and greasy long black hair streaked with gray. He was wearing filthy knee shorts and a blue tee in spite of the chilly weather. On his right temple leading up into his hairline he had ugly combat scars that made me wince to look at them. His face had a permanent wild expression, almost a caricature of helpless hopeless insanity. He was happy this time, however.

  “Get it? Get it? Zoom! Zoom! Taco shells, I reach in for taco shells? See? Zoom— Okay, zoom! Reach for the shells and, and, and —this baby he stick out this little hand, see? —Zoom! Zoom! Touch my wrist here! See? Baby! See? Zoom! Zoom!—”

  And then he broke down and cried. The police officers said they could get him into a shelter for the night or into the hospital for observation. Zoomy only shook his head, got up from the chair in which he had been sitting, and walked from the station into that January night.

  If it hadn’t been for that crazy homeless old garbage picker, I wouldn’t have lived long enough to see my second day.

  My umbilical cord was still attached. In the detective’s opinion, I had been tied up in that Walmart bag in an attempt to suffocate me. Hence, I owe my life, as well, to that certain someone’s ignorance on how to tie a knot. I would meet him in later years.

  Zoomy had cleaned me up in a gas station restroom at Main and North Farrar. He tied off my umbilical with a bread wrapper tie wire, cut the cord with an old straight razor he carried for defense, wrapped me in an old polar fleece blanket he stole off a line from a home on Mayhew Street, and then gave me to the Uvalde Police, Main Street Station, across from the Southwest Transport Truck Terminal. The police in turn handed me over to Uvalde Child Protective Services.

  Five weeks later, according to the UPD records, Zoomy Nine Eagles was found dead behind a different Dumpster on Nopal Street. He had been beaten to death presumably in order to steal his coat and blanket.

  Fingerprint identification on Zoomy showed him to be a former Marine, Master Sergeant Dale Robles, veteran of Syrian Not Really a War War II, four tours, three Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, and only enough of a brain remaining to find food and save the life of an abandoned infant.

  A roll of the dice, flip of a coin, a hand of poker among a few tarnished angels all seem less random than the causes combined to birth me and preserve my life. Most of the time I do not think on it. On occasion, particularly with believers who attribute all resultant effects to the design and implementation of a deity of one sort or another, I do wonder what such a being must have had in mind. What kind of goal had it chosen. Or, as an old sergeant of mine in Iran once asked me, “You ever wonder about, if Jerry Track is the answer what the question was?”

  Less than a day old, fresh from a Dumpster, I had no birth certificate, no DNA record, and no name. A court ordered racial pigeonhole DNA test a few days later identified me as “Lipan Apache,” henceforth subject to a different set of laws. The DNA information was forwarded to the Lipan Apache site in McAllen. Uvalde Child Protective Services attempted to hand me over to the Lipan Tribe, as well. The tribal spokesbrave refused my enrollment for reasons that mostly had to do with inconvenience and expense. My parents, according to their records, had never enrolled themselves nor me into the tribe. Hence there was no reason to assume they desired their child to be enrolled in the tribe, blah, blah, blah, and so on. In clearer terms, I belonged nowhere.

  As far as Uvalde Child Protective Services were concerned, my DNA classification as Lipan Apache removed me from city care. I was literally a federal case. The City of Uvalde handed me over to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. That eventually meant a bureau orphanage. One of the Southeastern Texas BIA federal orphanages, conveniently, was just on the other side of the wire from the City of Uvalde Service Center where their trucks, cars, scooters, bikes, police prowlers and surveillance drones, and other vehicles were cared for, and where I had originally been turned over to the police. At last I had found a home: U.S. Government Children’s Home at Uvalde, Texas, otherwise called the Uvalde Children’s Home (UCH) or “U CrotcH” for the syllable thrifty.

  After dropping me at the UCH Infant Care Unit, the orphanage records show that an “ethnically sensitive” federal naming website, used by all U.S. orphanages, issued me the name “Jerome Track.”

  As this “sensitivity” was explained to me years later, “Track” must have been next up in the algorithm governing the random letter-joining configurations in the surname generator for Indians (previously “Native Americans,” the previous designation subsequently objected to by Indians due mainly to the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series and the Kansas City Chiefs winning the Super Bowl in the same year. Back in favor, the term “Indian” once again enabled the Bureau of Indian Affairs to avoid having to get new stationary as well as make any other changes.

  “Track? Probably had something to do with railroads or maybe tracking,” guessed some gray woman in the UCH principal’s office when I was five and beginning my third year using computers. She thought on it a moment and nodded. “Your name is Track, you’re an Indian, Indian hunters track. So, there you are.”

  So there I was.

  The first name, “Jerome,” was where a real heap of “sensitivity” was applied. The Spanis
h version of Jerome is “Jerónimo,” pronounced “Geronimo” by English speaking North Americans. The Indian Geronimo was something of a warrior rock star among certain Apaches, thus the “sensitivity” to my own “heritage.” Who wouldn’t want to be named after such a great chief and warrior of the same tribe?

  The orphanage and school at Uvalde was supposed to be for Indians, but most of the kids there were leftover Mexicans and kids from Central and South America whose parents came to the United States seeking El Dorado, finding instead La Nada, a place of no places that was already finding it difficult to feed and care for everyone already there. The parents—adult relatives—died, ran away, were deported, stayed away. Leftovers, their children, needed to be dumped somewhere.

  There was a shortage of facilities for non-Indian orphaned children in federal care, so undocumented Hispanic orphans were made honorary “Indians” and “temporarily” dumped in the same orphanages, outnumbering the BIA Indian orphans. Because of that, there was no escaping the nickname “Geronimo” for me. No escaping the pranks nor the beatings, either. Most of those Mexicans hated Indians. Most of the Indians hated them right back. There was a very good reason why any kid at U Crotch who managed to reach the age of ten was an experienced knife fighter. When I was five years old, I searched the net to find out about this warrior rock star, Geronimo.

  First, Geronimo wasn’t even this fellow’s name. His name was Goyaaté. Next, Goyaaté was Chiricahua Apache, not Lipan Apache. He killed a lot of people who broke their treaties, was chased all over the southwest and northern Mexico, was taken prisoner, got to meet the president of the United States, became part of a wild west show, and died a prisoner.

  Goyaaté hated Mexicans with a passion, and Mexicans hated him. In hopes of getting a new first name, one that wouldn’t cause such entertainment among the Hispanics, I mentioned my discovery to the then assistant principle of UCH, Lisa Koontz.

  “Ms. Koontz,” I said to her one day, both of us standing in the dusty playground beneath a sweltering sun. “The government website named me after a Chiricahua Apache’s nickname. The DNA test says I’m Lipan Apache.”

  She was tall, with red-framed glasses and wispy bleached blond hair. She was a little tubby and always smelled like a skunk because of the medication she smoked. Dylan Nuñez, one of the older boys there, later told me Ms. Koontz didn’t give a shit about anything other than her medication. She taught health and hygiene, too.

  “Washington never does have any luck with websites, Geronimo,” Ms. Koontz told me.

  “My name—” I began

  Then she giggled and laughed out loud. “At least the program didn’t name you fucking George Armstrong Custer!”

  Ms. Koontz stumbled off laughing very loudly, more of her medication awaiting her. Her affliction must have been terribly acute. She smoked a lot and died of lung cancer a little under two years later.

  After my conversation with Ms. Koontz, I keyboarded George Armstrong Custer. He was a U.S. Army general who fought victoriously in the American Civil War against Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart at Gettysburg, was demoted after the war and sent west to fight Indians where he and his men were killed by braves led by Lakota war leader Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn.

  Custer never fought Geronimo, though. To find humor in Ms. Koontz’s joke, one had to assume that one Indian is all Indians, one Indian fighter is all Indian fighters, and a Chiricahua Apache is the same as a Lipan Apache. It made no difference. In the end I had to keep the name Jerome Track and near everyone continued calling me “Geronimo.”

  In a nation that prided itself on making it impossible for children to get legal paying jobs, we were worked like slaves at UCH. As far back as I can remember, we were always sweeping up, scrubbing and polishing floors, cleaning windows, doing laundry, painting buildings, digging ditches, trimming shrubs, working in the kitchen, pulling weeds, spraying bug poison, picking up trash, and doing all grunt that needed doing.

  Orphans at UCH were, we were told, sort of like cadets at the service academies in that we were considered employees of the Federal Government and were supposed to be getting paid for the work we did. We were told, though, we had to pay for our own clothes, shoes, food, dorm space, sheets, and beds. Our educations and health care, however, were “free.” All of these freedoms meant we had no choice in what or how much we ate, what little we learned, the threadbare rags we wore, nor who we got to take care of us when we fell ill or bury us when we died.

  We never saw any evidence of our alleged “pay,” except for wage and wage deduction slips, income tax returns, and Federal newsletters suggesting education and investment advice.

  No point in paying us, really. The very few times we were allowed on the other side of the wire were in rare group things like arranged “spontaneous” political protest demonstrations or going to live theater, political candidate rallies, and band concerts. The rallies and demonstrations were free, but the concerts were considered entertainment and deducted from our wages. When I was in fourth grade I learned from one of the tenth graders that bands, theaters, and politicians hire and pay schools like UCH to fill out audiences to show full houses for the vid pans that would be broadcast to the media during live events. No one likes an empty seat and we were still cheaper and more “honest” looking than computer generated imagery.

  The promoters paid UCH for bodies and the UCH students paid UCH, through our deducted wages, to attend the shows. Corruption, the concept rather than the word, was something we learned early in our educations.

  The only concert I really remember attending featured an all-male Irish poprap punk group named Stinkers Bridge that was so loud I couldn’t understand their lyrics and the music was so progressive they had abandoned adhering to either the same beat or the same song. Their message was pretty clear: The only way to get rich was to be evil, the only exception to the rule being Stinkers Bridge themselves. Their motto was: “Money made hating money isn’t money!”

  There were members of the faculty who considered that motto very deep philosophy as well as a justification for continuing to pick our pockets.

  Beginning before I can remember, during day rests and free moments I would sit in the shade of the breezeway connecting the classroom buildings with Building “P,” which housed the pre-school, nursery, and kindergarten “residents.” Looking west over the faculty parking lot and the half-circle driveway toward North Benson Road, I would wait expectantly for someone to come for me.

  My mother, from whom I had been stolen, would come at last, and she would be incredibly beautiful and fabulously wealthy. She would have spent uncounted billions of dollars trying to find me. When I closed my eyes I could feel her kisses, her warm embrace, and smell her fragrance. She would smell like lilac before the bugs got to it. When she arrived, took me in her arms, and brought me away from that awful place, my puzzle would be solved.

  I would imagine my father less clearly, casting one after another male faculty member in that role which none of them fit. None of the female faculty seemed motherly to me. For awhile Ella, the head nurse in the Infant Care Unit, was a candidate for my mother until the police took her away. We were told it was because she had been “inappropriate” with the children. What “inappropriate” was we didn’t know, but we were told to report anyone being “inappropriate” with us to the principal’s office.

  One of the second graders in the playground, a boy named Thiago, wanted to know what “inappropriate” meant. A girl named Abril said, “‘Inappropriate’ means not suitable or proper.”

  “What does ‘suitable’ mean?” asked Thiago. “Proper means just doing what grownups tell you to, right?”

  One of the older kids named Lorenzo said, “Mira. It mean if a grownup play with your dick or pussy or your ass or make you play with the grownup’s, that not suitable. That some inappropriate shit.”

  That day my parents did not come for me, but on that day I learned the definitions of “dick,” “pussy,” “ass,” and “i
nappropriate.” I also learned that anyone who had come from the Infant Care Unit at UCH in the past nine years had probably been touched inappropriately. There were about three hundred of us who had come through the Infant Care Unit over the previous nine years, but we all assumed we were the exceptions.

  The older kids referred to prospective parents interested in adopting an orphan “marks,” and called the interview between orphan and mark an “ankle-biter parade.” Usually those interested in adoption only wanted babies or three years old and younger. When older kids were viewed by prospective parents as possible candidates for adoption, the young kids still called them ankle-biter parades, but the older kids called it the “meat market,” and “inappropriate touching” was replaced by the word “rape.” The records show there were other viewings when I was an infant, but there was only one ankle-biter parade for me that I remember.

  I was presented for interview when I was almost five. I was so excited, mostly because I had been told that this was the big prize for an orphan, the brass ring, winning the Super Bowl. I was excited because I was told I should feel excited.

  A couple wanted me. Wanted me!

  Perhaps it was my real mother finally coming to claim me. She would be beautiful, dressed in furs and diamonds, and would know my real name, and she would take me to her beautiful limousine and have her chauffer drive me to my huge lovely home on the top of a green mountain.

  When I walked in from the playground, the door closing behind me, I saw the woman and her husband. She was very beautiful, but not wearing furs or diamonds. It was July, though, and too hot for furs. Diamonds probably didn’t go with jeans. And she didn’t know my name.